Friday, December 6, 2013

Schopenhauer sometimes knocks...

...on my door at odd hours. I always let him in for a little visit. If I had cognac, I would pour him a glass. I try not to say very much. I just let him pace and muse. He soon grows weary of my blinking presence and then exits the premises, with a raised imperious eyebrow and a muttered farewell.While he's here, I always fall into a trance of wonder.I think he would frown on me if I told him about the impression his thought makes on me. As I understand it, he was a metaphysician, a technician of ultimate reality. But when I use the word "metaphysical," I mean something looser, more informal, something not exactly related to philosophical technique. And the word signifies for me a resonant quality of beyondness that is ambiguously edifying. Whereas for Schopenhauer, whatever is beyond (the noumenal) is undifferentiated urge, an intuition of which should stimulate spiritual despair. Maybe "mystical" would be a better word choice than "metaphysical" for me. I've always been hesitant to suggest to him that there might be a quality of magnetic, attractive strangeness about the veiled world his conceptions indicated. Perhaps I should muster the gumption to ask him about that on some future visitation.Because isn't there something Schopenhauer-esque in the hypnotic macabre of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in the subtle Romantic ambience or "aura" of Walter Benjamin's essays, in the fatalistic hilarity of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, in the darkly transcendent sound of Mahler, the cathartic symphonic disquiet of Allan Pettersson? Whatever the freak it is that Schopenhauer uncovered for me as the possible interpenetration of the noumenal is a "thing" that nevertheless challenges all categories of conception and semantics.

His "will" or morphological force is farther than gods and language. A kind of spiritual empyrean. I sometimes think its texture is implicit in the vast melancholy of our dreams, the primal wild of our nightmares.But maybe I've ensnared myself within a many-years-long misreading of the great philosopher. Maybe he was merely speaking toward and into a kind of hyper-quiddity as such. And not, as I make of it, a speaking toward and into depths beyond even despairing substance. Depths that I would, with a kind of semantic wantonness, signify with the word "metaphysical."